The Missing Half of Street Vendor Digital Inclusion in India

India's push to bring street vendors into the formal digital economy has, over the past six years, concentrated almost entirely on two things: access to credit, and adoption of digital payments. Both efforts have produced real, measurable results. A third dimension — whether a customer can actually find a vendor in the first place — has received comparatively little attention, from policy, research, or the market.

This piece lays out what the data shows on the first two fronts, why discoverability is a distinct problem rather than a subset of them, and why it may be the more tractable gap to close next.

What the Credit Gap Looks Like Today

The PM Street Vendor's AtmaNirbhar Nidhi scheme (PM SVANidhi), launched in June 2020, was India's first dedicated micro-credit facility for street vendors. As of mid-2026, government data puts the scheme's reach at:

By most measures, this represents a substantial formalization of a segment of the economy that had almost no prior access to institutional credit. Independent assessments cited by government sources suggest a large majority of beneficiaries accessed formal banking credit for the first time through the scheme, and that a meaningful share went on to secure further credit beyond their initial SVANidhi loan — evidence that the scheme has functioned as a credit-history 'starter,' not just a one-time disbursal.

The Payments Gap Is Also Narrowing, But Unevenly

Alongside credit access, India's broader digital payments push has reached street vendors too, though adoption is uneven. Field research from Delhi-NCR and other urban markets consistently finds:

• UPI/QR-based payment adoption among street vendors is now substantial but trails other informal-sector segments (one recent study found roughly 68% adoption among street vendors, compared to 74% among gig workers and 82% among kirana/small shop owners).

• Vendors who do adopt digital payments report measurable revenue gains — several field studies report daily sales increases in the 15–25% range, attributed to reduced cash-handling friction and greater customer trust.

• Adoption barriers remain concentrated among specific groups — vendors with lower baseline digital literacy, older vendors, and those in areas with inconsistent connectivity.

Academic work in this space — including a 2023–24 qualitative study of vendors in the Kashmir region, and more recent Delhi-NCR survey research — has been thorough in documenting how vendors adopt payment technology and why some don't. What's notable is what this research does not examine: whether a customer can locate a given vendor at all before a transaction — digital or otherwise — ever takes place.

Discoverability: The Dimension That Isn't Being Measured

Search across the available research on street vendor digitalization in India, and a consistent pattern emerges: nearly every study frames "digital inclusion" as a transaction-layer question. Can the vendor accept a digital payment? Can they access credit through a digital application process? Are they part of a digital financial identity system?

None of the research reviewed for this piece addresses a more basic, upstream question: Can a customer who isn't already familiar with a specific street location find that vendor at all?

This matters because it's a distinct constraint from either credit or payments. A vendor can have a SVANidhi loan, accept UPI, and still be invisible to any customer who doesn't happen to walk past their specific spot on a specific day — which, for a street vendor whose location and hours shift daily by the nature of the business, describes most potential customers most of the time.

Digital payments solve friction at the point of sale. They do nothing to help a customer find that point of sale in the first place.

Put differently: credit access and payment digitization both assume a customer has already found the vendor. Discoverability is the step before that assumption holds.

Why This Gap Persists in CSR and Policy Funding

Part of the reason discoverability has received less attention may be structural, not just an oversight. India's CSR spending — now roughly ₹40,000+ crore annually and growing at 8–10% a year — shows a persistent pattern that is relevant here:

• CSR funds are concentrated in a small number of high-visibility sectors (education and healthcare account for more than half of total spending).

• Urban livelihood and informal-sector programs are frequently cited by CSR researchers as relatively underfunded given their scale of need.

• In at least one measured period, livelihood-enhancement CSR spending specifically declined even as total CSR expenditure rose — a pattern that runs counter to the general growth narrative around Indian CSR.

• Geographic CSR allocation also skews toward low-poverty, corporate-hub districts; NITI Aayog's "aspirational districts" — the areas identified as most in need — receive a small single-digit share of total district-level CSR spending.

None of this is a criticism of the credit and payments work that has been done — that work has been substantial and well-documented. It's an observation that a specific, measurable, and currently under-addressed gap sits alongside it, and that CSR funding patterns may partly explain why.

What a Discoverability-First Approach Looks Like

This is the gap OnGoCart is built to address — not as a replacement for credit or payments infrastructure, but as the missing third layer.

The approach is narrow and specific: give every street vendor a live, location-based digital listing that updates as they move, so a customer's phone can show them a vendor even without prior familiarity with that vendor's usual spot.

This is a genuinely different intervention from either SVANidhi-style credit or UPI-style payments — it doesn't require a vendor to change how they transact, only to be visible before a transaction is even a possibility.

What This Looks Like in Practice: Gift a Coupon, Empower a Business

Unlike most CSR interventions in this space, supporting discoverability doesn't require building new infrastructure or negotiating a multi-year program before any vendor sees a benefit. It can start with a single, concrete action: gifting a Subscription Coupon.

A Subscription Coupon is a prepaid, year-long OnGoCart listing subscription (₹365) that any individual, NGO, or company can purchase and pass directly to a street vendor — who redeems it to activate their own digital listing.

There is no intermediary step, no fund disbursal process, and no waiting for a program cycle: a coupon purchased today can put a vendor on the map today.

For CSR teams evaluating where a rupee goes furthest, this offers something the broader funding landscape often lacks — a direct, one-to-one link between a specific contribution and a specific vendor's outcome, without routing through a large multi-year program.

Organizations interested in sponsoring coupons at scale — for a specific market, neighborhood, or vendor community — can reach out to discuss a structured partnership.

Where This Leaves Funders and Researchers

For CSR teams, NGOs, and researchers working in this space, a few implications follow from the above:

Organizations interested in this space are welcome to reach out directly — more on how partnerships work is available on our Empower page.